Katrina and Social Media

Would it have helped?Five years later

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast it was August 29th 2005Social media as we know it, was but a baby.

Communications with the gulf coast leading up to the hurricane were not as good as one would have thought or hoped...

Communications after the storm? Next to none.

In 2006, MySpace became the most popular social networking sitein the United States...

But we still didn't know or truly understand the power of social media...

Facebook had just been created the year before...

It would be another year before Twitter would be created.

YouTube was only 6 months old...

It would be another 2 years before Tumblr and Friendfeed...

Flickr was a year old...

It would be 4 years till Foursquare would launch

My friends crawled out through the roof and floated away on a raft...

I knew the people that lived here...

-If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd most populatedin the world. 500 million people strong.

-There are 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute!

-There are 4 billion images hosted on Flickr.

-The average number of tweets on Twitter per day is 27 million.

Could social media have helped save the 1800 people who lost their lives in Katrina?

We'll never know, but I like our chances going forward.

In January of this year, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti. With an epicenter only ten miles from the capital Port-Au-Prince, it decimated most of the major buildings in that city and flattened almost every structure around it. Approximately 70,000 people died.

Literally within hours of the earthquake, photos began appearing on major news outlets but this time they were coming from Tweetpic . According Sysomos, a Twitter tracking service, 2.3 million tweets included the words Haiti or Red Cross in the first 48 hours after the Earthquake.

Much of this traffic was the passing of donation information. The Red-Cross launched a social media and mobile campaign for text donations - and the word spread via Twitter and Facebook. They raised more than $3 million in the first 24 hours after the earthquake and by the following Sunday had gotten to $21 million. This obliterated the $4 million that was raised by text messaging in 2009, and was far far greater than raised in a similar time frame after the Katrina disaster.

Additionally, Twitter influencers also raised an extraordinary amount of money in a short period of time. Wyclef Jean asked his 1.4 million followers to donate to his foundation by texting Yele . He reportedly was able to raise approximately $2 million.

-http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2010/08/30/the-power-of-social-media-from-katrina-to-pakistan/

marc meyer dir. of search and social media digital response marketing group marc.meyer@drmglistens.com